Chrysler
Museum of Art
The Chrysler Museum of Art was founded in 1933
as the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, but when automotive
heir, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., whose wife, Jean Outland Chrysler
was a native of the city, would donate the majority of his
extensive collection to the museum that would expand it's
collections, and actually making it one of the major art museums
in the southeastern US. From 1958 to 1971, the collection was
housed in the historic Center Methodist Church in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, but today sits alongside a small body of water
called the Hague in the Ghent district of Norfolk, Virginia. The
collection contains more than 30,000 works that span more than
5000 years of world history in American and European paintings
and sculptures from the Middle Ages to the current period. Its
most prominent holdings include works by Tintoretto, Franz
Kline, Veronese, Richard Diebenkorn, Peter Paul Rubens, Andy
Warhol, Diego Velazquez, Jackson Pollock, Salvator Rosa, Edward
Hopper, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Georges Braque, John Singleton
Copley, Henri Matisse, Thomas Cole, Georges Roualt, Eugene
Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, Paul
Cezanne, Auguste Rodin, Albert Bierstadt and Gustave Dore. It is
also home to the last sculpture of the baroque master,
Gianlorenzo Bernini, which was a marble bust of Jesus that had
been made as a gift for the artist's benefactor, Queen Christina
of Sweden. It contains the world's finest collections of glass
that include many works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, a marvelous
and growing collection of photography and distinguished holdings
in decorative arts. Other areas that are represented include;
Asia, the ancient world, pre-Columbian America and Africa. The
Jean Outland Chrysler Library is also one of the finest and
biggest important art libraries in the south, covering the
entire history of world art with special emphasis on materials
that pertain to the permanent collection; as well as subscribing
to many hundred art-related journals, exchanges publications
with more than 400 art museums across the globe and an
outstanding collection of current and historical auction
catalogues.
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